My review

rat­ing: 5 of 5 starsThe Iron Hunt is a beau­ti­ful­ly writ­ten book with some inter­est­ing twists on estab­lished fan­ta­sy memes. To some extent, I felt that I’d come in to the world on book 2 or 3, but as far as I know (and from what Ama­zon says) this is the first book of the Hunter Kiss series. There was a bit of Buffy and a lit­tle Witch­blade, with oth­er ele­ments I’m sure I’m over­look­ing.

For once, it’s good to see a nov­el in which an estab­lished cou­ple has a seem­ing­ly-healthy rela­tion­ship. Max­ine and Grant have very dif­fer­ent skills, but they work togeth­er well. That said, this is not a romance, so some of Liu’s read­ers may not enjoy it.

Edit­ed to add: I just learned that there is, in fact, a pre­quel to this book in Wild Thing (an anthol­o­gy), which I hadn’t heard of before. I’ll cer­tain­ly be look­ing for it.

Hot­ter Than Hell, the lat­est “Hell” anthol­o­gy is edit­ed and has an intro­duc­tion by Kim Har­ri­son. I don’t know if the sex­i­er trend is her choice, a response to mar­ket demands, or some­thing else again.

The anthol­o­gy is thick­er than most, with longer pieces–short novellas?–by each of the 13 authors. I read a copy from the library, but it’s one of the few antholo­gies that I’d con­sid­er worth the $7.99 cov­er price.Read the rest of this entry »

I want to find some of Mar­jorie M. Liu’s longer works, as “Where the Heart Lives” isn’t the first of her short sto­ries that have impressed me. What’s even bet­ter is that WtHL is a total depar­ture from the ear­li­er sto­ries I remem­ber.

Well, that’s what it felt like. Poor Sam had to take time off from work, because it was Pain Doc Day. The pain doc­tor is off in the wilds of Cobb Coun­ty, because that’s where we lived when I start­ed see­ing a pain doc­tor, and it’s darn near impos­si­ble to get a ref­er­ence to a new one (much less trust that a new one will, in fact, keep writ­ing pre­scrip­tions for the meds that actu­al­ly work). Then we head­ed to Big Ware­house Store to get the RXs filled, and also hit the bank and the post office because they’re just so much fun! And then it was time to go see the friend­ly ther­a­pist lady.

Hap­pi­ly, we were able to game off and on dur­ing the day, which made the whole busi­ness far more pleas­ant than it would have been oth­er­wise. And we picked up a great big bag of fat-lady clothes from a nice freecy­cler! Some of them are so cool the girl is eying them cov­etous­ly, so I need to be sure they go to my room and don’t wan­der off to hers.

While we were gone, though, a sweet fairy girl washed our quilt and com­forter! Sam put fresh sheets on the bed, so I’ll be crawl­ing into a nice, clean bed next to a fresh­ly-show­ered, cud­dly man soon. That part of the day, I’m look­ing for­ward to!Read the rest of this entry »

Sam and I had a very nice date night while Katie was out with her beau. He had start­ed mak­ing chili last night, fin­ished it tonight, and added corn muffins. I’m not a big fan of chili (I won’t eat it if Sam didn’t make it), but it was a very sat­is­fy­ing meal.

The girl is doing very well in the online course she’s tak­ing, and I’m hap­py to say that my semes­ter is going well, too. It’s hard to believe that my baby will like­ly start col­lege cours­es this sum­mer or fall!Read the rest of this entry »